The Final Piece

Her name was Susan Goldstein. She joined our class in late September. When Mrs. Joyce introduced her, Susan’s face shaded scarlet. Sitting in the desk next to hers, I could feel her radiating a prickly heat as she mumbled, “Clover.”

“Clover,” Mrs. Joyce pronounced. “Okay. I think we can handle that,” she said, beaming to the rest of the class.

We erupted. “Clover?! What kind of a name–?”

Mrs. Joyce clapped her hands to quiet us. “Okay,” she said.

Clover’s chin was buried in her upper chest and her eyes cast downward so intently it seemed she might have been trying to unravel the secrets of the universe in the constellation of knicks and gouges on her desk.

“And you come to us from Texas?”

Clover nodded, barely.

“And what part of Texas?”

She answered, but no one could make it out. After an interminable beat, Mrs. Joyce took pity on Clover and turned the class’s attention back to long division where it had been before the arrival of Clover Goldstein from Somewhere, Texas.

Through the course of the week, we cycled through typical grade school reactions to a new, weird arrival: curiosity, hints of hostility, and, finally, indifference. And it was only in this latter stage that Clover appeared to find comfort. There she could blissfully disappear, or try to.

Our classmates largely obliged—she no longer seemed worth the effort. But I continued to steal glances. It wasn’t a fantasy of rescue or affirmation. Simply, I was fascinated. She was from Texas, for one thing, and that I didn’t understand. Not her being from Texas necessarily, but Texas itself. She may as well have been from Pluto. During one of the very few times she spoke to me, when I asked her what she thought of Maryland, her answer was that there were no trees where she was from.

“No trees?” I asked. “What do you mean?”

She didn’t answer, aware suddenly of the neighboring faces turned her way. It was the drawl, I’m sure, more than the nonsensical answer, that attracted the attention. It was as if some unseen hand had tugged on her lips or poked the insides of her cheeks, a strange mechanism that made words drip and crawl out of her mouth instead of how we talked, the right way: rapid fire staccato.

“What on earth?”

“Say that again!”

Other rejoinders followed, many of them less curious than mean, and so her mouth shut once again. She didn’t open it back up, apart from when she nibbled on her paltry lunch, alone on the far end of a cafeteria table while it bounced and shuddered to the movements of squirming rambunctious kids on the other end.

Worse, in that transitioning fall season, she never had the proper clothes—sweaters when it was warm out, woefully inadequate thin coats when it was cold. An easy target and yet my silent attention to her didn’t bend that way. I know this now but didn’t then (or don’t think I did): I saw some of me in her. Or her in me, somehow. And I didn’t fully understand me. So maybe she offered some kind of key to the mystery. Why else did I stare at her, try to engage her, want to know her?

That mystery deepened a few weeks later, at our class Halloween party. We were bobbing for apples—one of those relics of a pre-pandemic age, with its lack of general squeamishness and its robust belief in the efficacy of vaccinations and inoculations. To my surprise, Clover participated. To my greater surprise, vigorously. Perhaps she had accrued experience in the finer arts of bobbing back in Texas and saw this as an opportunity to show she belonged here. But that, too, I found peculiar. She had clearly wanted nothing other than to disappear and yet there she was, undertaking the game with a vigor that surpassed even the most ardent apple-bobber among us. We watched spellbound as she thrust her face in the barrel without hesitation, each time coming up without an apple but then dunking her face back in again to try and clamp down on the elusive spinning fruit. But then her glasses dislodged and sunk to the bottom of the barrel. She had to fish them out with a bare hand amidst the chunks of tooth-knocked fruit and gnawed rind. The loss of her glasses in the soup was deemed too unhygienic for some reason, and Mrs. Joyce ended the game. Of course, the blame was parceled out loudly and Clover retreated again to her shell.

If only she could have stayed there, waiting out her days until the summer when we were all set to leave that school anyway. Instead, what would happen to her would prove a singular event in the childhood of most, if not all of us, a story to tell for years to come. Depending upon the audience and the circumstance, it could be a gross-out, or a warning, or, if presented in just the right way, with just the right amount of flair and cruelty, a dark cosmic joke. It was, like so many things in life, both comedy and tragedy in one. Only in this case, its contours were sharper and more fantastical than most of the stories any of us would later get to tell.

But it was different for me. Whatever holdovers of innocence my childhood had originally bestowed on me had been dislodged between my eleventh and twelfth birthdays. In many ways, I was already an adult, or at least a child steeped in the vagaries of life. I was like older people who’ve lived long enough to have at least heard of if not experienced firsthand incidents with faulty brakes, or an unseen patch of ice, or a sudden wretched medical diagnosis. On my eleventh birthday, I witnessed my dog slip into an epileptic seizure: the bulging unseeing eyes, the thick foamy slick at her beard while my mother held her but not too tightly, away from the mouth and its reflexive biting. Our dog didn’t die then, but she emerged from the seizure after seven minutes with a brain so cooked that she no longer had use of two of her legs. She also emerged blind and deaf. My mom put her down three days later. She didn’t speak for that whole day and didn’t make dinner and she vomited in the garden. And then my father died, one year later to the day, keeled over from a heart attack while handing me my birthday present, forever left unopened.

For several days after he died, I experienced the world as if it had become a film negative, witnessing objects in absence because he was absent. A tree branch with a red bird on it. The bird hopping, wrapping its claws around the spindly branch. Cocking its head over and over as if the entire world was one big puzzle waiting to be solved. All this was happening while I looked at it. It happened the day before, too. It would happen the next day. But my father does not see it. He won’t ever see it again. Are things only real once you see them? I will not see anything anymore, too, one day.

He used to tell me, as he tapped the side of his own or my head with his pointer finger: “Every person is a universe.” I never quite understood that. I think it was intended as some kind of inspiration, a call to strive, to meet my full potential. He also used to say to me: “You never really know anyone.” What used to spark this pronouncement I have no idea. My parents’ union was perpetually a shaky one, residing in icy silences and yawning gulfs, and so maybe this was triggered by a fresh realization or a confession delivered in other rooms while I sat silently pretending that my world wasn’t on the precipice. A third dictum: “You don’t have to simply swallow the gruel the world serves up.” I never asked for clarification or expansion. I would just nod or mumble, “Okay,” and that seemed to satisfy him.

But now he was gone and it was these imparted lessons that I clung to, as if puzzling them out now would allow him back into my life somehow. I was conscious of his slow disappearance. For a time, when I was very young, I associated a particular sound with him. He had traveled to Vietnam for business and returned with a puzzle game consisting of tiles that had to be moved to match a pattern printed on accompanying cards. He held each tile below the end of his pointer finger, considering, until he slid it into place. That sound—the sweep of bone tile across wood table—was in some ways a defining sound of my childhood. And I could no longer conjure it. It was gone.

So when I stole glances at Clover, chin on her chest, lips moving slightly as if worrying some personal incantation, I thought maybe she somehow embodied everything he meant. There was a kind of universe in her, an unfathomable deep secret, the answer to the mystery, which is why she kept it all so close and hemmed in. Little working cogs, an infinity of them, all spinning toward that weird unknowable thing that was Clover Goldstein herself. If I could just unravel that . . .

* * *

It had finally arrived. We were going to the H.C. Mason Company chocolate factory. We’d been waiting for this for five years. And now that it was the springtime of our 5th grade year, our last at Longenecker Elementary School, it was our turn for the annual trip to the factory. We’d been hearing the stories for years: how the chocolate is made, the long chutes, most importantly the free samples at the end of the tour.

Everyone buzzed with excitement. I wanted to join them in that excitement but Mrs. Joyce informed us that our seats on the bus would replicate our seating arrangements in class, which meant I was next to Clover. Worse, Mrs. Joyce wasn’t herself that morning. She snapped at several kids before and as we boarded the bus. Clover and I were directly behind her and our second chaperone, Ms. Lillian, so I was hemmed in. I settled into my seat and looked over at Clover, but she was, of course, staring at her hands in her lap. It appeared as if she was actually shrinking into herself, like trying to implode or at least melt into near-nothingness and slip into the small gap between us on our restraintless bench seat.

Not long after the bus driver shut the doors and the grumbling beast rattled down the highway, Ms. Lillian turned to Mrs. Joyce. “You okay?” she asked.

“Yeah. I guess. All the funeral business. I don’t know.”

“Oh, I didn’t know. I’m sorry. You could have called out today. Was it someone close?” 

“My stepfather.”

Ms. Lillian placed a gentle hand on Mrs. Joyce’s forearm. “I’m so sorry.” 

“Don’t be. I loathed him. Terrible alcoholic. He was cremated . . .” Mrs. Joyce quickly looked behind her. I stared ahead blankly, as if I hadn’t heard anything.

She continued with a whisper: “I figured that s.o.b. was going to burn for three days.” Ms. Lillian let out a snort.

“Oh, I shouldn’t be so awful. As much as I despised the guy, it broke my heart to watch him the last two years. Just wasting away. When he was diagnosed, he was all, ‘I’m going to live a full life with whatever time I have left. No more sitting in front of the TV. I’m going to live!’ It was an admirable reaction, a movie scene, you know? Of course, life ain’t movies. He was too sick to do anything. So he wound up sitting in front of the TV anyway, letting cigarettes burn down to his fingertips.”

“That’s grim,” Ms. Lillian said.

“You know what I can’t stop thinking about, though?”

“What’s that?”

“His last words. ‘Trixie, grab my hat’.”

“Is Trixie your mom?”

“No. That’s the point. And he never, ever, wore a hat. The utter banality, you know. ‘Trixie, grab my hat.’ Those are the final, triumphant, words. The legacy.” 

“Not the most profound epitaph, I guess.”

“And, of course, it left my mom wondering who the hell Trixie was.”

Ms. Lillian was quiet. They didn’t talk again the rest of the ride. I looked out the window, which allowed me to look at Clover not looking out the window. I wanted to point out the trees to her—with their bare branches, packs of small black birds busying themselves in their herky jerky way. But I didn’t. I also wanted to put my hand on Mrs. Joyce’s shoulder, tell her I understood. But of course I didn’t do that either.

I got what she was saying, though. I heard echoes of my father. You never really know someone. Anyone. It would have been a simple enough thing for me to say to my teacher. It would have allowed Mrs. Joyce to look at me differently, to forever remember that deep and profound kid who would soon be off to middle school, someone she would never see again but would think about from time to time, that kid who said just the right thing on the way to the H.C. Mason Company chocolate factory on that early spring day, so many years ago. But I didn’t fully believe in Mrs. Joyce’s humanity—or, I suppose, “humanness” is the more apt word. This rare and accidental invitation into her private life carried with it the same kind of infected tinge I felt when I ran into my school’s principal one day while grocery shopping with my mom. I could tell he was uncomfortable and yet he performed admirably, running a rough knuckle over my head and asking after my homework. And yet the whole time, I couldn’t turn away from the mundane items in his cart: canned spaghetti sauce, instant noodles, Hamburger Helper, toilet paper. I wanted to flee.

We pulled up to H.C. Mason and the bus kept up its idling growl as we disembarked. A buzz of excitement and anticipation rippled through us as Mrs. Joyce and Ms. Lillian herded us into two lines. A community liaison for the factory —he introduced himself to us as “Mr. John”— met us at the front door. I’m sure most of us expected Willy Wonka, or someone of his ilk. Instead, Mr. John wore a bulky cardigan with three buttons, one of them undone, the next one struggling to contain his belly. He wore gray wire-rimmed glasses. He had a close-kept gray beard and his hair was swooped from one side of his head just above the ear to the other. It was all very disappointing.

Following him inside only heightened the disappointment. It was a sweets factory, specializing in chocolate. What could be more exciting? And yet, you walk in and you realize it’s, well, a factory. An efficiency machine. There’s no magic. It’s all quality and precision, a whirr of machines spitting out chocolates in varied shapes and shades and yet each resembling, to some degree or another, a turd. Worse, it was cold in there. They hadn’t prepared us for that. Mr. John remarked on the need to keep the temperature cool, for reasons of sterility but also to allow the chocolates to keep their shapes and not melt. It made sense and yet none of us had reckoned on it, and so we all walked around with our arms wrapped around ourselves, shivering. It was loud, too. The grand machines with the belts and perpetual motion kept up a din. Mr. John was unfazed, yelling out as we moved from station to station. It was while we were stopped in front of one of those stations that it happened. We were at the business end of a long chute, just beyond where a rapidly moving line of cookie wafers passed under a nozzle that sprayed a dark chocolate coating. Mr. John was explaining the logistics of the supply chain, how cocoa beans made their way from West Africa, through processing in the Netherlands, and then shipped to the United States, where they came through the Port of Baltimore and then by truck to the factory. Some of us, including me, had our eyes on the scaffolding as workers in white coats and safety goggles moved back and forth, carrying clipboards and walkie talkies and looking for all the world like medical personnel engaged in triage. Whatever the case, none of us happened to be watching Clover as she reached out toward the machinery. This was determined afterward. It was only the high-pitched squeal of spinning metal against bone that made us turn toward her. Mrs. Joyce, being closest, froze when the spray of blood hit her face and shirt and hair. She looked down at her chest, her hands held in mid-air as if testing currents or trying to divine an explanation for why she was suddenly speckled with a viscous substance. No doubt she initially assumed it was the chocolate sprayer gone awry. But when she realized this wasn’t the case, she looked skyward, as if perhaps something had dripped from the ceiling. Then down, as if maybe a vat of melted chocolate had tipped and splattered. Then, finally, just as the rest of us, she looked at Clover, her face a shade of such absolute white that she looked almost translucent—a beautiful, horrible ghost-child floating above the ether. The pointer finger on her right hand was gone to the second knuckle and a rhythmic spurt of blood pumped into the air.

Clover stared at it with fascination, not horror. Then she looked up, a deep pleading in her eyes discernible behind her thick lenses. A worker came running, then another. A boy from our class passed out. A girl vomited. One of the workers was on his hands and knees, scanning the floor for the severed finger. Another worker mashed a big orange button and the machinery came to a stop, its edges coated in a marbled tapestry of beige and crimson.

I happened to be the one closest to the conveyor belt. Without thinking, I reached over and grabbed two pieces of chocolate and stuffed them into my pocket. This I reconstructed later, as I don’t remember doing it—or why. But I did do it, in that liminal space between the incident itself and the aftermath: Mrs. Joyce standing frozen, the noise itself, the pallor of Clover’s face, the scurry of the workers—all was still a thing needing processing and that processing manifested as inaction, frozen bodies and slack jaws. Only after that moment—two seconds, perhaps; two minutes maybe, who knows?—came the strange sense of elation, excitement rippling through the student body, each of us delivered into another country where the rules of everyday conduct and experience no longer applied. That is when I acted.

* * *

The bus ride back to school was silent. I figured that Clover was at the hospital by now and her parents had been notified. I imagined them blaming the whole incident on Maryland, that such a thing would never have happened in Texas. As for the rest of the kids on the bus, who knows what they were thinking? But no doubt the incident played itself in a loop in everyone’s head, altering slightly with each revolution. It would be processed, rewrapped, and then submitted in overly excited tones the moment my classmates burst through their front doors. They would breathlessly tell their parents and siblings what happened, barely suppressing their excitement, reveling in the fact that it was they who were the keepers of the tale, the first hand accounters. But not me. The secret, I felt, was mine—and, more to the point, my classmate’s from Texas. I felt obligated to hold that for her, to not add yet one more layer to the spectacle that was Clover Goldstein.

It was the encompassing silence of the bus, I am sure. That, and the fact that the seat next to me was now empty, that I knew I could act in secret. After confirming that the two chaperones in the seat in front of me were not looking, I reached into my pocket and extracted one of the pieces, slightly melted and yet sticky with blood. I took only a quick glance at it: mottled, the pale brown of the milk chocolate veined with tiny rivers of red so dark they were almost purple. My finger adhered to it but with a little force I pulled my finger off, watching as threads of blood held fast before severing. I hesitated, but only a little, before I placed it in my mouth.

A metallic tang coated my tongue. Its harsh flavor shot up through my nose. My stomach immediately protested, turning over in a quick churn. I bit it back. Then I gagged, but that was okay. Welcome, actually. An enterprise as monumental as what I was after shouldn’t have been easy. And in any case, it was but a moment before the chocolate subsumed the blood and what was left in my mouth was simply sweetness: cocoa and sugar—and then I swallowed it down.

* * *

I’ve resisted looking up Clover Goldstein online. I know that if I see her now, as a fully formed adult, someone with an entire life behind her—it’s been thirty years since our visit to the chocolate factory—that person will replace the girl I knew, the girl I didn’t know. I don’t want that. Some things should remain unadulterated. So instead, she remains encased in amber, perfectly preserved, the girl from Texas who lost her finger in a chocolate factory, the girl who sat beside me on the bus there but did not on the way back, the girl I never saw again (she did not come back to school that year), the girl I would not know, could not know. The girl I wanted to know, for reasons I didn’t then and still don’t fully comprehend now. But whatever the reason, I wanted to. Perhaps knowing her would allow me to know myself, and everyone else around her. If I could crack her impenetrable shell, well . . . anyway, it doesn’t matter.

I did the only thing I knew to do at the time. I swallowed. As I say, I won’t look her up or seek her out. What would I say to her? Plus, how to tell her I still have her finger, entombed in paper towels, tucked into a box in my garage, unopened—for fear of what I’ll find, for the impossibility of confronting what I’d done—since the day I put it in there in the fifth grade, depositing it in that box when I got home and realized that what I had in my pocket was not a second piece of chocolate at all. No, I would keep that, too. My dad was right: we can never really know anyone—not the Clover Goldsteins of the world, and surely not ourselves.